In 2022, I stumbled upon a letter from 1941 tucked away in the archives of the American Embassy in Lisbon. It was penned by none other than Harpo Marx. At the time, my focus was on a completely different archive, but curiosity led me to this intriguing find. Captivated, I embarked on a journey to uncover the story behind this letter. My exploration resulted in a publication on Academia, which caught the attention of The Forward. PJ Grisar from The Forward reached out for an interview, crafting a beautifully detailed story from our conversation. Dive into this remarkable piece of history here. Following this piece, a relative by marriage of Helene Schickler reached out to me. Through her, I eventually found a photo of Helene
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On April 4th, 1941, Harpo Marx, the silent and miming member of the Marx Brothers, wrote a remarkable letter headed with the logo of the famous film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. At the time, the Marx Brothers were working on the release of the comedy The Big Store, the last film they would make for MGM. Marx's letter was addressed to Bert Fish, United States Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Portugal at the embassy of Lisbon, and contained an urgent plea for help.
I discovered the letter during my professional research into the history of the Shoah. I could find no mention of it in Harpo Marx's autobiography, Harpo Speaks, nor in any other of the numerous publications about the Marx Brothers. However, this story should be more widely knownknown because it highlights the serious side of this world-famous comic actor.
The case that Marx describes concerns his aunt, a 72-year-old Jewish widow named Helene Schickler, who had been in Naples, Italy, for two years when he wrote the letter. Schickler was German by birth and, like many Jews, had fled Nazi Germany in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. In Naples, she found herself in or near a convent, in the Campo di San Bartolomeo that served as an internment camp for refugees from Nazi Germany. However, she could not stay there because of limited food supplies. She had a visa that would have enabled her to travel to the United States and join her son Max Schickler, who had already ordered her a ticket for a steamer to make the trans-Atlantic crossing from Lisbon, Portugal. However, to allow her entry into Portugal, the Portuguese authorities required proof of final booking, which she could not provide. Her visa to enter Portuguese territory was denied. Helene Schickler was trapped in Italy.
After reading Harpo Marx's letter, Bert Fish also received a letter from Max Schickler referring to his famous cousin Harpo. Max also included a letter from his mother describing her predicament.
From Helene Schickler's letter, it is clear that she was in a state of panic. She wrote that the local police had sent a doctor to the convent where she was staying to determine whether she was fit to make the journey to a concentration camp. Helene then had to report to the police station, where the room was full of cigar smoke, and she became unwell due to stress. The police allowed her to go outside to recover in the fresh air, but she had to leave her visa and papers behind until she could leave for the US. She wrote that she hardly had any money left and stressed that she was scared and tired of living. She had lost a lot of weight and, with it, her strength. She told her son she did not believe life would bring her any good anymore. She signed the letter as "your lonesome mother."
Both Harpo Marx and Max Schickler seemed to believe that a letter from a famous movie star on MGM letterhead would carry weight in Lisbon. They were not the only ones. Also in 1941, Sol Lesser—later known for producing Tarzan movies—wrote a letter to Bert Fish on Principal Artists Studio letterhead, asking for help for his mother-in-law's first cousin trapped in Germany. Lesser gave as a reference his friend James Roosevelt, son of the president—but to no avail. Marx and Lesser received similar responses. They were people of German nationality, not Americans. Thus, the US Embassy in Lisbon could not interfere. To Lesser, Fish wrote that the Portuguese authorities would not allow such interference; to Marx, he wrote that it would be inappropriate. Max Schickler received no reply, as far as is known.
How did Marx's aunt's story end? After Helene Schickler's desperate letter, I can find nothing that offers certainty about her fate. The investigation is far from complete, but this is what we know and need to know. Helene Schickler could move freely in Naples but had to report daily to the local police. Both the regular local population people and the internees suffered from hunger, something Marx referred to in his letter. The life of the Jews detained there, and the efforts of the convent and the local population to help them, are described in the fascinating book It Happened in Italy (2011) by New York-born Elisabeth Bettina, whose grandmother was from the area.
When searching the administrative sources relating to Jews persecuted in Italy, one should note that personal records were usually registered with the Italian version of their subjects' first names. For Helene, this is Elena. In the digital archives of the Holocaust remembrance center Yad Vashem, I found Elena Schickler without mentioning her place and date of birth. This Elena Schickler was on a list of Jews arrested in Trieste., in the northeastern part of Italy. It is not inconceivable that Elena Schickler was subsequently imprisoned in Isiera di San Sabba, a compound in Trieste that served as a Nazi concentration camp for political prisoners and Jews. Most of the Jews there were deported to Auschwitz—as was Elena Schickler. If Helena and Elena were the same person, it would mean that the Nazis almost certainly murdered her at Auschwitz.
We know that Helene Schickler was not actually Harpo Marx's aunt—and Max Schickler was not Harpo's cousin. They were, in fact, in-laws. Helene Schickler's husband and the husband of Marx's maternal aunt, Hannah Schickler, were brothers. In 1910, Hannah had been part of a singing group with the Marx Brothers and their mother, The Six Mascots. In his autobiography, Harpo states that the Marxes considered everyone with a German Jewish name to be family. These were not just empty words. Through this brief history, we learn that Harpo Marx tried to save people he had never met but nevertheless considered family. He was the silent one of Marx's brothers in his comic films. Offstage, he wrote in silence to save a woman whose life he considered part of his own and bring her home.